It’s definitely going to go either way. I think it will be challenging for many DMs but I’m sure others will thrive. I’ve pinned a comment with a link to our game. The last 30-40 minutes or so is just us talking about it, including the GM!
I like games that add some creativity to the mix of GMing. I can see how some would find it stressful, but it makes it more interesting for me. Often times DMing a game like D&D with rigid rules leaves you just feeling like a rules robot, which to some might be easier, but is also a lot less rewarding.
I personally like to add flavor around success and failure, and I improv fumbled for critical fails in my game. But I would not want to have to come up with something for some random dice check in a low stakes environment. That kinda sounds annoying.
I've run 2 games so far and it has been incredibly fun. I don't think it's anymore complicated than 5e d&d in terms of tactical or thematic thought. The only part that required any extra thinking was the fear success rolls, which is quite minimal. The experience I have had so far my load has felt a lot lighter, mostly due to tracking. It is so much easier to keep on top of monster resources. The only major point of challenge for me has been remembering to use experiences for monsters.
I found that the go to "yes but" when characters roll with fear is causing one point of stress. If nothing interesting comes to mind, saying it took effort to succeed so it caused a point of stress can be applied to a lot of situations
That can be a good approach. Certainly something I would avoid trying to do too much as Stress is valuable for the players too but depending on the nature of the roll, it can certainly make sense!
@@InsightCheck Yeah. It's important to not overuse it, but it's an easy way to represent rolling with fear when there's nothing you can describe as a GM that wouldn't turn the success into a failure.
I tried a disadvantage on your next roll with a certain attribute quite good. You climbed the tree but your muscles will be sore, agility rolls get 1 dis. You spent all night reading about the monstera and now your brain feels a little foggy, dis on knowledge for 2 rolls.
@@jameswright21 That's a good idea and doesn't spend resources. The idea of you executing the task but you're not efficient is quite good in general. You discover the information but it takes the whole day, you negotiate a good price but now you own a favor, the guard believes you but doesn't seem to like your attitude, these are all good ways of role-playing rolling with fear
As far as Daggerheart roll for Stats, what we did was: 1d4 hope & 1d4 fear. Roll both subtract fear from hope. 16 outcomes four of which are 0. 6 results being positive, 6 being negative with a 3 in 16 chance of getting a +1 or -1, a two in 16 chance to get each a +2 or -2 respectively and a 1 in 16 chance to be cursed with -3 or blessed with +3. Afterwards allow to add a +1 to any one negative stat. In theory this conforms to the standard more often than not, but made for a surprising array of strength and weaknesses in our play-test. Plus it doesn't really matter as much as in a min-maxed DnD character. A -3 looks more like an opportunity than a real handicap.
I personally have had problems with rolling for stats because ive generally had negative experiences with it as a player. Point buy or standard array lessens the gap between people, and is my preference when running games.
I usually set a minimum combined result of 75 or reroll, and it's been rare for anyone to roll far above or far bellow that. It just gives a bit more variety than the point buy and standard array, as people usually squeeze out an 18 or even a 20 in some stat, which helps focus the direction of their character. Did have one player roll under 75 like 6 times in a row, so we switched his lowest (a 6 I think) for an 18 once because I could see him getting dishearted. Since I use D&D Beyond now, I just let players use the roll there as they can't cheat that. I mean, if a player has the patience to click the individual reroll for each set of stats for hours to get just the stats they want in a session zero I'd honestly applaud the dedication! 😂
@probablythedm1669 yeah I’ve played around with 70-75 before as well. I think 75 is the sweet spot and we do it for basically this exact reason. Just gives a bit more versatility and my players enjoy leaning into lower scores sometimes. The Ranger in my group rolled a 4 TWICE for his Charisma stat. I offered to let him reroll again and he refused. Instead it’s made for such a fun character! He loves it 4 years later and has no regrets.
Honestly this. I hate rolling for stats. It’s fair, balanced, and fast this way. I do agree that they can add some more options for generating though, like a questionnaire based on values or history could be fun. Or a random table that generates narrative aspects and a trait modifier attached.
While point buy or standard array is great for things like the RPGA where players will be playing different adventures at different events with different players and you want all characters to have fair attribute scores among them, it does tend to lead to MMO style min/max ultimate builds that are frankly boring when everyone is doing this. But for a home game, the DM should be adapting their adventures to the abilities of the players. So if most/all don't have high stats, then the DM should be toning down the difficulty a tad to compensate for the slightly lower average rolls the party will be making, especially when running premade adventures which may assume characters with higher stats. As someone who's old enough to remember the days of 3d6, in order, good luck... people these days have it way to easy.
I haven't gotten a chance to play Daggerheart yet, but Dungeon World has similar "You succeeded, but..." mechanics. I know it can be a lot for a DM, but maybe you can shift some of the burden of creativity to the player. "What do you think went wrong?" It's probably not for every table, but I bet it gets faster as you settle into a style as a table. And if you ever get narratively stuck, you can always fall back on giving out a Stress as the downside.
Been DM'ing a regular D&D campaign for 3 years and ngl, I love the Daggerheart Character creation, I've made more characters in daggerheart already then I have ever made in 5e - and I made a lot, so I'd argue that's a matter of taste :D
Observation so far: An emphasis on cooperative play during players turns that looks rewarding. An inventive and Fresh take on initiative that shakes things up. And the hope fear aspect just adds to the randomness of the dice results. I had the same thoughts about narrative descriptions during combat to explain the dice results but that isn't all that different to what the DM is suposed to do. And most importantly it looked fun.
As somebody who's played a lot of more narrative focused games that feeling of the half success or success with a twist being weird clears up pretty quick. It's a bit harder in games where rolls are more common I admit but you do develop a muscle for it eventually.
The point of some players not acting in a fight is to minimize the amount of action tokens the GM has to play with. Hope and Fear will happen regardless. If you have a character who is particularly adept at fighting a specific kind of adversary, you don't want other players to make moves. They ought to stand around as meat shields for the GM to waste their limited Fear/Action pool on. That they can do without providing the GM resources.
There's often things that can be done in support that isn't just attacking and yeah, I mentioned about the action tokens in the video. It can make sense, but I feel like the entire principle behind the game is really not to think "optimally" though.
Daggerheart is certainly a fairly forgiving, narrative focused game, but respectfully, I consider it a failure of game design if using the game's rules intelligently is less fun than not engaging with them strategically. "Its fun if you don't look at the rules too hard" is an indictment of said rules, and an open beta is explicitly LOOKING for these kind of issues to correct.
I've seen this mentioned quite a bit. People infer that the tone of the rules being flexible means things like "the rules writers aren't confident" or other nonsense. What's actually happening here is that there are many implied or cultural behaviors in d&d style games: gm's overwriting or replacing rules, players haggling or lawyering around how things are phrased, and characters using skills or feats to exploit things in a context they weren't intended for. The looseness of the rules on dh are just about codifying those behaviors exist. The rules are otherwise very specific and very clear, and it's pretty easy to tell when the rules arw being broken.@@quincykunz3481
@@InsightCheck Game mechanics that require the players to not think or act optimally are absurd and produce "ludonarrative dissonance." They are almost always bad game mechanics. I had the same observation. If we're in combat, and I have a non-combat-focused character and we're losing, I'm screwing over my party if I want to play the game, too, because I will be providing the GM with actions without my party getting the maximum survival benefit from them. That sucks. This forced specialization can manifest in other aspects of the game, like stealth, social, exploration, etc.
Honestly I feel like it's up to the GM to just say that every player has to act at some point. Just like how the DM has freedom to basically let monsters act when he feels like it's appropriate, if a PC hasn't taken an action, and the others all have, I would toss the ball to that PC and tell him he has to act before any others can. Unlike D&D the GM is given a lot more power in a narrative system like DH. If it doesn't make sense in the fiction, don't allow it. I suppose if the character actually wanted to be totally out of the conflict it'd be okay, but then he wouldn't be tanking hits either. And I don't think anyone is going to be such a liability you'd rather just not have them in the fight at all, even if their actions are suboptimal. If that is the case you may want to sit down with that player and help him move some stats around to be a more useful combatant. DH is not supposed to be a tactical miniatures game like D&D. If you approach it like chess, it's not going to be as fun. Having one player just not act isn't fun and doesn't fit the fiction.
DH "Experiences" remind me of Aspects from Fate - a descriptive word or phrase that you can invoke in a variety of situations for a bonus but that the GM can also use against you. In fact, Daggerheart reminds me of Fate in general, but maybe trying to be a tiny bit crunchier?
I highly recommend that your Experience is conceived as a day job "Master Carpenter" or a specific previous experience "spotted a lost ship at sea at night during a storm from miles away". This in my experience hits a good sweet spot between too broad and too narrow.
Daggerheart is FATE (Experiences, Hope, and bell curve) plus D&D (classes, levels, and general difficulty numbers), Blades in the Dark (the partial failure/partial success idea), and Guild Wars (multiple skills but you can only slot a few). At least that's how I see it.
As the designers note in their section on inspirations for the game, Experiences are directly lifted from Backgrounds in 13th Age. There's only two differences: Experiences can affect combat rolls (in 13A it's only for non-combat skills), and they cost Hope to activate (in 13A Backgrounds are "always on").
I disagree with revealing enemy evasion and thresholds detracting from the narrative, simply because Dimension 20 is a very narrative heavy series, and Brennan Lee Mulligan always tells the players what the monster's AC, or the Skill Check's DC is before they roll, and that doesn't take away from the narrative of the series. (Sure it's 5e, not Daggerheart, but I think the point still stands)
I think the easiest way to roll stats would be (1d4-2) x6. And their standard array reflects an exactly average roll of that. This is the beta and they likely didn't want data skewed by characters with all 2s. I'm guessing they'll have at least one other method in the final product.
I actually had a whole portion in the script for this and it was basically rolling a d2 which is essentially what you’ve got here. I ended up cutting it.
@OsamaZahid308 lol yes I’m aware. As I said, it was just something I was thinking about and had started writing ultimately scrapped since it wasn’t what I wanted to get into.
Had a session zero yesterday to get a feel of the system and meet the players, and im really excited for the next session! We had a short combat and one of the players noticed i was a bit quiet and lost (as a player and a character) and gave me a cue to strike. I rolled a crit and incinerated 2 enemies, and that created a nice replaying gimmick within the party, with the character that gave me the cue realy excited and worried, leading to whole talk about forests and fires and a few come backs after as we entered a tavern on a giant tree. I think that with some time and familiarity the battles can flow really well.
I haven't played the game, but it really sounds like Daggerheart is much closer to Forged in the Dark or Powered by the Apocalypse systems than D&D, but then tries to shoehorn D&D-style combat into that mold, which is why a lot of the combat mechanics are so clunky and math-heavy to use very FitD resource management. The hope and fear system also seems really cool but like it's designed for out-of-combat stuff and starts to struggle with D&D style combat since that involves so many dice rolls in a very short amount of in-game time and doesn't have strong notions of partial success or partial failure that aren't already built into the math. I think a lot of people, myself included, do want a game that's somewhere in between the FitD/PbtA style and D&D/Pathfinder style, but I think it really wants a more creative resource management system so that you can draw on the same pool of resources for everything but basically run combat and non-combat as separate but related games.
When you are running the game it doesn't feel like a lot of math. Subtracting big damage numbers from big hp totals is completely absent and that helps a lot. Determining HP loss from damage taken is really just a glance, and there are some tricks that make it easier. The only regular mathy bit is adding the 2d12 for action rolls or rolling adding pools of dice for damage.
@@XerrolAvengerII I guess I hadn't thought about the fact that 2-digit subtraction is about as many steps as checking against a threshold and counting.
I personally like the chunk of making a dnd character, for for my play group my goodness is simpler a better fit. The questions, specifically relationships are fantastic. Also really love the experience bit. Very similar to core rules of Legends/City of Mist and Wildsea. The fear thing, I bet taking a page out of Wildsea and inviting the other party members to supply ideas.
For fear i would not come up with a complication on the spot, the GM just gains Fear. Then when the fear is spent they describe the complication as its being used/activated on their terms not the terms of the dice.
Great video and I enjoyed hearing your point of view on the game. It was a blast playing with you and hope we can do it again! I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed DH Thanks for the shout out!
Going through a full Session 0 and creating characters by going through the steps in the character packs together makes a huge difference in this game. Just finished a session 0 and ended up with some of the most interesting characters I have seen and a table of players deeply connected to them and the others, excited to get started.
Its strange to hear you say character creation was not so exciting or made you feel in touch with the character, the whole section of background questions and relationships with other folks is core to the creation and engages you with the real meaning of your version of the class as well as your hertiage and background. Its the best part.
The armor system means that when a PC takes damage, there's 5 steps to go though, 1 of which is a decision step. Comparitively, in 5e it's 3 steps and they're all just math. So yeah, it will take longer. But on the other hand, compare how healing works, In 5e it's 2 steps with a lot of counting. In DH it's 1 step, no math. There's also generally less math happening in other parts of DH combat, because there's not the potential to stack as many buffs and bonuses as in 5e.
Thanks for another great video. I also like the team actions (don’t know if you guys did it at the table), i feel DH encourages players to team up more and come up with interesting ways to describe how they can combine abilities.
I tried building something similar to the Experience systems for the Backgrounds in my homebrew game system I'm building, but as I was building it, the more I hated how loose it was and it became nearly impossible to balance it due to the difference between narrow and broad skills, as well as deciding if the roll constitutes that skill or not. I ended up reverting back to a hard list Skills system because it's a lot easier on the DM to choose from a shortlist which proficiency to apply to any given roll. I've downloaded the playtest, so I'll take a look at it to see if it solves the issue I was having.
Some games combined the general and specific skills to a single check. For example, the Firefly RPG each character has a proficiency for every general skill and a specialty in one or two skills, which gets added only when the player is using their specialty. An experienced marksman who has Shoot D10 will add their specialty "Snipers D6" to their roll when using their sniper rifles. That exact same marksman, who is using a sidearm doesn't get to add the "Snipers D6" specialty to the total. This doesn't mean they are bad with other firearms, it just means they are more skilled with certain weapons. The balancing is that all specialties start at D6 and never improve... while the player can improve the general skill. *Shrugs* Don't know if this helps or not, but it's just my thoughts on your problem.
@@aralornwolf3140 Thanks for the reply. I'll keep it in mind when I go back to the drawing board to go over the changes I need to make based off of my first playtest.
While I do Apreciate them making the system I struggle to see myself running this - it comes with a requirement of knowing the players because I can see alot of folks bouncing off hard due to the vagueness of the turn rules
It's not significantly different from PbtA or FitD style games and those both have a good number of fans. They are absolutely not for every group and it doesn't look like Daggerheart is aiming to be "something for everyone" either and that's a good thing.
One problem I've heard another content creator bring up is the death system. It does feel like it take the impact of death out when you can choose to take a scar rather than die. Of course, the dm gets to decide how debilitating it is. But then if the injury is bad enough to disable the character, some of the prosthetics and magic items in the book are better than what you lost.
From what I see, I think having a list of pre-established suggestion wrinkles for rolling with fear would help massively. That way, if the GM can't think of something off of the top of their head, they can just pull something from the list (or otherwise, look to the list for inspiration while coming up with their wrinkles).
As far as stat generation goes I think I read something where the total of all six has to equal 3. There could be room for some min maxing and taking more penalties in some stats to bump up others. But personally I like the standard array, as I always roll low stats.
People who are evangelical about not rolling for stats aren't that way because they don't like rolling their own stats. What they want is to control what OTHER people do and make sure other people do it the same way they do. And that's gross.
lol I think everyone is well aware :P. It’s more about the names tied to it and many, including myself, are really interested to see what they come up with when it’s their own system from the ground up :) Also, the reality is that there were a ton of players brought into 5e and TTRPGs more broadly as a direct result of Critical Role and this is likely their first look at an alternative system and that’s ok. Everyone expands their world somewhere. I’m not here to gatekeep anyone.
I have 3 concerns with Domain cards. First, spell casters lose a lot of flexibility in spell selection. Second, characters with overlapping domains can’t select the same abilities. Third, only having 5 cards in hand at higher levels and having to spend stress to use the other abilities you earned through advancement doesn’t feel good.
To assuage your fear on flexibility, the wizard and bards domain cards are tomes and have multiple spells per card. You also can swap cards you have ready (in your loadout) with cards in your vault whenever you rest with no additional cost. Lastly you can pay stress in the moment of combat to swap out a card you have ready for a card in your vault, different cards have different stress costs to swap based on the power of the card.
I assume the cap on 5 domain cards comes from experience with D&D 4e, where the huge stack of powers at high levels led to a lot of analysis paralysis.
I haven't played it, just watched the CR One-Shot of it, and yeah, just watching, the damage rolls seemed clunky and non-satisfying. Out of the new systems coming out now, I'm most excited for is DC20. I think the mechanic of rolling damage and to-hit into a single roll is very simple and satisfying. The way in D&D and Daggerheart, that you can roll amazing to-hit, and then do almost nothing with your damage... is such a let-down...
This is a great review. I think it would be fun to play once or twice, but in general this is not my style of game. Especially players feeling like they are going to win every combat and feeling low variance on that - that sounds boring to me. People kill D&D for it's CR system, but it's HARD to try to make balanced encounters where the PCs are threatened but not immediately crushed.
This really is a game made for groups like CR, roleplay heavy, actor types, drama lovers, and people who are willing to take an active part in directing the narrative. It's not going to be for everyone. As to the point about skills, D&D didn't originally have skills, because the game was more abstract and skills were too crunchy. But 2e changed all that. And I'm still not sure the game needs them, at least not in so complex a form.
Can you comment on character death? From what I've seen it looks like character death will be extremely rare unless it's thematically justified (i.e. the player wants it to happen).
a player can entirely avoid the death of their PC as much as they want, death is always a choice or risk you opt into, but if you keep avoiding death you'll build up Scars and eventually have to retire
Yeah their point is correct but slightly misleading in that you can’t necessarily avoid it “as much as you want”. They mentioned the Hope element( but it came off as a bit simpler than I think it is. There’s 3 ways of dying as presented in the text, one includes going all out in a blaze of glory. One of the methods is to roll your Fear die and if it is equal to or less than your level you take a Scar. The intent is for you to work with the GM to describe how your situation gets “much worse” because of it. Sure, you could treat it as a get out of jail free card, but that’s clearly not the intent. Also, every Scar that you take reduces your maximum Hope by 1, when you cross out your last Hope slot, you die permanently. It’s also worth noting that there are no Death Saving Throws like in 5e. So, if you go down multiple times in the same fight and choose the “avoid death” option, you can take multiple scars just from one combat.
So Experiences - essentially customer skill names - I love them and they are essentially 13th backgrounds - also similar the “pride” on forbidden lands Duality dice - I thought I’d love these but mechanically they horrible - they suffer from all the success - with failure mechanics in narrative games ; and if a group is having significantly more hope that’s fear roles in a game with more 20 rolls in a night, sorry there is some serious cheating going on - it’s just simple math (critical role had something like 17 hope to 2 fear) - the duality dice being paired is also an issue ; there have to be times when fear is more likely than hope and vice versa … my suggestion is weight the mechanics to d10/d10 with situational modifiers sting the dice up or down to d12-d8 - same curves, higher change of fear/hope - damage … ffs this is just stupid … call it damage and wounds and move on Stress I think is broken - it needs to be integrated into the “hit” mechanic There is no initiative - there is no action economy- there is no stepping on toes ; you can’t say go whenever the narrative makes sense then complaint some people do it more that others - there needs to be a mechanic for taking “more” turns than others and the game has it … it’s called stress - when you give the DM a monster action token, you mark that as stress … then add a rule - when you succeed with hope, if you’ve already taking a turn in a scene, you can take a DM action to replace stress list in this way - I like it but it needs work Re doing nothing - it’s 8%+46%, so 54% vs 46%… doesn’t really factor in. Re crit - monsters will crit Now the elephant … the writing is horrible , the organization atrocious and that needs attention more that wheelchair combat rules. On rules - way too many for a rules lite game, by about 350 pages This should be “boardgame” level of rules - cards should interact with the rules, but not change the rules (ie they are not exceptions to the rules) and fully contained in the cards (domain and class, background etc) Monsters likewise should just be cards and tokens and “should always activate” as they are resource dependent - get rid of the d20, it’s completely unnecessary and homage to D&D that isn’t needed. Seriously get really good editors and a new game designer I don’t want this to go the way of OC which should have been an awesome game drawing on Vaesan, Blades and CoC - I mean it took real effort to mess that up
A common comment I hear is that hope and fear both accumulate too quickly for the players and the GM to spend it. Also that the five outcome types is a lot to handle. Would it be a good solution, to have 'normal' rolls (2d12 but no hope/fear, just a success or fail) besides duality rolls, and have duality rolls be a little bit more exceptional rather than having it be the norm? Or would that harm the nature of the game or add too many rules stuff?
My biggest issue in Daggerheart is that it basically gives every player the equivalent of ActionSurge/TwinnedSpell and Alert and a generic damage character can alphastrike every combat without actually being a jerk. Not a low level problem but... higher level with proficieny damage bonuses WEW BUDDY!
Have you looked at high level creatures and their damage thresholds? Some creatures go up to 18/50/80 thresholds, so it's not like these proficiency levels just go against the same thresholds players have. You might roll 3d10 damage at proficiency 3 and only take 1HP from some of these enemies. Even though the game is slightly skewed towards rolling with hope being more frequent, it's close enough to 50% that GMs can just break the flow of lucky players by spending fear. I don't see this alpha strike you speak about happening very often
@@XerrolAvengerII I mean the game heavily skews for the damage focused PCs so go first and take all the actions as high level adversaries will have high thresholds that only the damage dealers can hit. Because weaker characters deal less damage AND give the GM action tokens. So the best tactic would be the damage dealer duking it out with the monsters almost every combat to minimize GM actions.
@@shocknix Since proficiency increases with level and there are weapons for each trait (so you get the best for your +2 trait), what is this "low damage" you speak of? Also, some classes have utility powers that don't deal damage, like healing or absorbing attacks from your friends. If the damage dealer is low armored, they will also be the damage receiver and need healing. If they are heavily armored then they can't dodge shit and will eventually be without armor and need healing. I don't see this hypothetical scenario you speak of where the damage dealer rolls with hope several times in a row and is always in reach of an enemy (remember, moving more than short range to attack requires an agility roll that might roll with fear)
@@dancovich Analytically, @shocknix is correct. Sure, every now and then you might need a utility thing, but the best strategy in combat will almost always be to let the combat-focused characters take all of the turns, and not give up a Monster Action Token to have the Bard do some marginal thing. The reality is that PC actions now compete with EACH OTHER for action economy efficiency, and each player is now asked to share their actions and use them for the good of the party. Which is going to mean some PCs/players sitting out some combats/rounds/situations completely. Probably frequently.
I think it's going to be a good game. However, I've seen narrative-forward games like this before. I doubt it'll take over D&D's space as the representative of TTRPGs. Honestly, I doubt that it would make much of a blip on most people's radars if Critical Role wasn't involved with it.
i have said i think daggerheart is for roleplyers and D&D is for turn base dice rollers. the problem i see is the people that have no imagination or cant think on their feet daggerheart is not for you. if you have fun when you get to a town/city this is for you.
rolling with fear is only more complicated when you're used to the simplest, least interesting "you either do it or nothing happens" resolution DnD implies, you should only be rolling dice if there's risk, so when you're thinking about what might happen succeed or fail on every roll then adding success-at-a-cost is easy, you just give the player both or parts of both
Something that annoys me is experiences are just so meaningless most of the time, at level 1 you have a +2 to a roll (if you spend a resource) at best from background. Now i dont think 5e's skills are perfect, but any average PC at level 1 will have at least one +5 in their best ability and more slightly less than that. That makes more defined charachters as the mechanics fit. Now theres a debate about how most dms run skill checks and wizards breaking down doors barbarians couldnt, but thats a fairly system agnostic discussion imo. Its just i do all this work to make my unique backstory which grants me bonsues in places only i could get them (which i love) for a grant totaly of making my 11, a 13. WOW i feel so unique and heroic.
The probability of a critical succes is not 8% as you mention. That’s just the probability of any number in a d12 to land, the actual probability of a critical succes is 0.08*0.08=0.006 or 0.6%. So it is definitely not higher than D&D’s 5%.
This is not how probability works. To have two matching dice, one of them is “correct” 100% of the time. As a result you only need to calculate the odds of a match. Or simpler. There are 144 different possible rolls on 2d12. 12 of them are crits (1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3) etc. 12/144 is 8.3%.
@@InsightCheck That's not how probability works. Look into probability of independent events. You are calculating it as if it was a 144 face die with 12 "correct" landings, but each event (or die in this case) is different so you have to multiply the probability of each die to land on one number. If you threw them separately and you were trying to match the "correct" number of the first one you threw it would be 8,3%, but as you throw them at the same time it's only 0,6%.
@ScrappyCocoCR I can assure you that this is 100% how probability works in this scenario. There are 144 possible outcomes on 2d12. 12 of those are crits. 12/144 is 8.33333333% There are 20 possible outcomes on 1d20. One if those is a crit. 1/20 is 5%.
@@InsightCheck Coins landing on the same face and dice landing on the same number are the basic examples they use for teaching probability of independent events in school. If you google "how to calculate two dice landing the same number" it says what I've been trying to explain to you. It says "The probability of one dice being a particular number is 1/6. The probability of two dice being the same particular number is 1/6 x 1/6 = 1/36. This is not the same as saying that both dice are the same number. There are six different possible numbers, so that would be 6/36 or 1/6." Really enjoyed the video, not trying to be an ass, but that's just incorrect.
@ScrappyCocoCR I’m glad you enjoyed the video and I really don’t think you’re being an ass lol. I do see exactly where you are coming from and how you’re arriving at your odds but it’s isn’t accurate for what we are trying to do to calculate the crit chance. You are calculating the odds of getting any specific pair. The odds of getting exactly a 1 and a 1 or exactly a 6 and a 6. In that case, you are completely correct that the odds of getting any specific pair is 1/144. However, that isn’t what matters in the game since you don’t care *which* numbers you double, just that you roll doubles. In which case the odds are 12/144 or 1/12. You can also see this if you multiply your 0.69% by 12 you will arrive at the same 8.3% chance.
Is it true you can crit succeed on any dual role regardless of whether you make the DC or not, even a one one on the two d12s...... If that is so.... that is ridiculous. And there's no critical fail???? That definitely needs to change..... Say like it's a critical success if they get the dual numbers and meet the DC and get a hope..... or critical fail if they dual numbers but don't get the DC and the DM gets a fear!! . I also don't like the weapon damage, I mean a dagger and a long sword both do d8 damage i believe....WWT?? It should be small weapons do D4 damage, medium weapon's do d8 damage and large weapons do d12 damage. . Daggerheart is easy to be OP for players as it is now. . I think the only time you should get hope or fear from a dice roll is in combat and only on a critical role outside of combat! .... That's my two cents....
Please take this comment as a constructive one, not a critcal one. Meaning this comment is coming from someone who wants to help out, not criticise. Your content is great. Your analysis valuable. But in your script or presentation, you need to reduce the number of times you say the word "really". Down load the transcript and you'll see just how often it is used. As an adjective it adds little. There is not much difference between something being enjoyable or really enjoyable. And when you use the word as often as you do it starts to grate on the listener.
Honestly, thanks for pointing it out, I don’t think I’ve ever even noticed this. I went and checked my script and I used the word 24 times in this video. That’s averaging more than once per minute hahaha. I’ll be more aware of that in the future. Thanks :)
@texmame hahaha this is so funny. I just went to review my script for my next video, it was there 21 times. I think I got rid of 19 of them. I never noticed.
How many women were in your playtest? I am super concerned that the "whenever" initiative system will end up prioritizing groups that commonly have an easier time speaking out and taking control, and will end up making a worse game experience for people who either don't have the same level of social forwardness (or comfort) or who can be in danger of being overlooked in male-centric groups. Any thoughts?
I don't think Daggerheart is for me. The problem with the duality dice is that they turn the very concept of TTRPGs on its head. DMs create a world and a set of problems. The players make decisions to solve those problems, and they make rolls to determine how well their player interacts with the world. With duality dice, players make rolls that not only determine their effectiveness but also rewrite the world around them to an extent. Everything the DM does becomes reactionary. I don't hate anyone for liking daggerheart, but I struggle to see a world where this is ever a quality game system.
It’s certainly not for everyone and the entire world is extremely reactionary which will definitely not sit well with many. Someone else commented that it’s just a bad D&D clone and I was blown away lol, it plays so differently and the entire concept is fundamentally different. But they do both have dice lol! It’s definitely not a game for everyone though that’s for sure!
I'm not sure what you mean by it being reactionary. Fear is a resource that provides structure for what a GM wants to do. It combined with action tokens give the gm a kind of fuel tank that helps create a balance between the GM and the party. Although players and GMs will always be on opposite sides of the teeter totter, the statistics is still well balanced and a GM that is not over or under spending fear will not present an encounter too trivial or too overwhelming for the players. As a dm who tends to be a bit control freaky about encounters and rules, it is a little daunting but learning to trust fear and action tokens amd embrace the freedom of turn order can really make the game way less stressful.
Yeah I have mentioned that I don’t think it’s a game that’ll work great for everyone. It requires certain expectations to be set between all players. For what it’s worth though I did only know one of the people on the game.
@fred_derf yeah, that’s why I said, an emphasized in the previous video, that knowing your players well will be the real determining factor in whether or not a group is successful with it.
"I love tedious character creation...armor is too tedious." Great video. You present everything like someone I want to talk to, it doesn't seem like someone just talking shit. See dicebreaker.
@daxmcanear haha I think they are experienced a bit differently. Character creation happens independently of the game on my own time, I like that :). Armor happens during the moment and takes me out of it! Dunno if that makes sense!
i don't really like the emphasis on toys at the table (that includes the unnecessary rules for maps and minis), but to be clear, Hope has a cap of 5 per PC and the cards are just for reference, you never shuffle, draw, or play them
Played at GenCon, short answer, Daggerheart sucks. If your a Critical Roll Fan boy, then go at it. So many other better games. Hope/Fear is a horrible design.
Watch our one shot here!
ruclips.net/video/kDPJSFTf_5o/видео.htmlsi=r7V5QKQHUTK5gVhk
I'm very curious about what the DM of a game has to say, as it honestly feels like the game is far more stressful for the DM.
I am interested too. However, I feel like this is going to be a preference for some DMs.
It’s definitely going to go either way. I think it will be challenging for many DMs but I’m sure others will thrive.
I’ve pinned a comment with a link to our game. The last 30-40 minutes or so is just us talking about it, including the GM!
I like games that add some creativity to the mix of GMing. I can see how some would find it stressful, but it makes it more interesting for me. Often times DMing a game like D&D with rigid rules leaves you just feeling like a rules robot, which to some might be easier, but is also a lot less rewarding.
I personally like to add flavor around success and failure, and I improv fumbled for critical fails in my game. But I would not want to have to come up with something for some random dice check in a low stakes environment. That kinda sounds annoying.
I've run 2 games so far and it has been incredibly fun.
I don't think it's anymore complicated than 5e d&d in terms of tactical or thematic thought. The only part that required any extra thinking was the fear success rolls, which is quite minimal.
The experience I have had so far my load has felt a lot lighter, mostly due to tracking. It is so much easier to keep on top of monster resources.
The only major point of challenge for me has been remembering to use experiences for monsters.
I found that the go to "yes but" when characters roll with fear is causing one point of stress. If nothing interesting comes to mind, saying it took effort to succeed so it caused a point of stress can be applied to a lot of situations
That can be a good approach. Certainly something I would avoid trying to do too much as Stress is valuable for the players too but depending on the nature of the roll, it can certainly make sense!
@@InsightCheck Yeah. It's important to not overuse it, but it's an easy way to represent rolling with fear when there's nothing you can describe as a GM that wouldn't turn the success into a failure.
I tried a disadvantage on your next roll with a certain attribute quite good.
You climbed the tree but your muscles will be sore, agility rolls get 1 dis.
You spent all night reading about the monstera and now your brain feels a little foggy, dis on knowledge for 2 rolls.
@@jameswright21 That's a good idea and doesn't spend resources.
The idea of you executing the task but you're not efficient is quite good in general. You discover the information but it takes the whole day, you negotiate a good price but now you own a favor, the guard believes you but doesn't seem to like your attitude, these are all good ways of role-playing rolling with fear
As far as Daggerheart roll for Stats, what we did was:
1d4 hope & 1d4 fear. Roll both subtract fear from hope. 16 outcomes four of which are 0.
6 results being positive, 6 being negative with a 3 in 16 chance of getting a +1 or -1, a two in 16 chance to get each a +2 or -2 respectively and a 1 in 16 chance to be cursed with -3 or blessed with +3. Afterwards allow to add a +1 to any one negative stat.
In theory this conforms to the standard more often than not, but made for a surprising array of strength and weaknesses in our play-test. Plus it doesn't really matter as much as in a min-maxed DnD character. A -3 looks more like an opportunity than a real handicap.
I personally have had problems with rolling for stats because ive generally had negative experiences with it as a player. Point buy or standard array lessens the gap between people, and is my preference when running games.
Absolutely, it’s a personal preference and a table thing for sure. My group all prefers rolling for stats so we do it that way!
I usually set a minimum combined result of 75 or reroll, and it's been rare for anyone to roll far above or far bellow that.
It just gives a bit more variety than the point buy and standard array, as people usually squeeze out an 18 or even a 20 in some stat, which helps focus the direction of their character. Did have one player roll under 75 like 6 times in a row, so we switched his lowest (a 6 I think) for an 18 once because I could see him getting dishearted.
Since I use D&D Beyond now, I just let players use the roll there as they can't cheat that.
I mean, if a player has the patience to click the individual reroll for each set of stats for hours to get just the stats they want in a session zero I'd honestly applaud the dedication! 😂
@probablythedm1669 yeah I’ve played around with 70-75 before as well. I think 75 is the sweet spot and we do it for basically this exact reason. Just gives a bit more versatility and my players enjoy leaning into lower scores sometimes.
The Ranger in my group rolled a 4 TWICE for his Charisma stat. I offered to let him reroll again and he refused. Instead it’s made for such a fun character! He loves it 4 years later and has no regrets.
Honestly this. I hate rolling for stats. It’s fair, balanced, and fast this way.
I do agree that they can add some more options for generating though, like a questionnaire based on values or history could be fun.
Or a random table that generates narrative aspects and a trait modifier attached.
While point buy or standard array is great for things like the RPGA where players will be playing different adventures at different events with different players and you want all characters to have fair attribute scores among them, it does tend to lead to MMO style min/max ultimate builds that are frankly boring when everyone is doing this.
But for a home game, the DM should be adapting their adventures to the abilities of the players. So if most/all don't have high stats, then the DM should be toning down the difficulty a tad to compensate for the slightly lower average rolls the party will be making, especially when running premade adventures which may assume characters with higher stats.
As someone who's old enough to remember the days of 3d6, in order, good luck... people these days have it way to easy.
I haven't gotten a chance to play Daggerheart yet, but Dungeon World has similar "You succeeded, but..." mechanics. I know it can be a lot for a DM, but maybe you can shift some of the burden of creativity to the player. "What do you think went wrong?" It's probably not for every table, but I bet it gets faster as you settle into a style as a table. And if you ever get narratively stuck, you can always fall back on giving out a Stress as the downside.
That’s honestly a great approach and I fully agree it’s something that will probably get easier with practice!
Been DM'ing a regular D&D campaign for 3 years and ngl, I love the Daggerheart Character creation, I've made more characters in daggerheart already then I have ever made in 5e - and I made a lot, so I'd argue that's a matter of taste :D
Observation so far: An emphasis on cooperative play during players turns that looks rewarding. An inventive and Fresh take on initiative that shakes things up. And the hope fear aspect just adds to the randomness of the dice results. I had the same thoughts about narrative descriptions during combat to explain the dice results but that isn't all that different to what the DM is suposed to do. And most importantly it looked fun.
As somebody who's played a lot of more narrative focused games that feeling of the half success or success with a twist being weird clears up pretty quick.
It's a bit harder in games where rolls are more common I admit but you do develop a muscle for it eventually.
The point of some players not acting in a fight is to minimize the amount of action tokens the GM has to play with. Hope and Fear will happen regardless. If you have a character who is particularly adept at fighting a specific kind of adversary, you don't want other players to make moves. They ought to stand around as meat shields for the GM to waste their limited Fear/Action pool on. That they can do without providing the GM resources.
There's often things that can be done in support that isn't just attacking and yeah, I mentioned about the action tokens in the video. It can make sense, but I feel like the entire principle behind the game is really not to think "optimally" though.
Daggerheart is certainly a fairly forgiving, narrative focused game, but respectfully, I consider it a failure of game design if using the game's rules intelligently is less fun than not engaging with them strategically. "Its fun if you don't look at the rules too hard" is an indictment of said rules, and an open beta is explicitly LOOKING for these kind of issues to correct.
I've seen this mentioned quite a bit. People infer that the tone of the rules being flexible means things like "the rules writers aren't confident" or other nonsense. What's actually happening here is that there are many implied or cultural behaviors in d&d style games: gm's overwriting or replacing rules, players haggling or lawyering around how things are phrased, and characters using skills or feats to exploit things in a context they weren't intended for. The looseness of the rules on dh are just about codifying those behaviors exist. The rules are otherwise very specific and very clear, and it's pretty easy to tell when the rules arw being broken.@@quincykunz3481
@@InsightCheck Game mechanics that require the players to not think or act optimally are absurd and produce "ludonarrative dissonance." They are almost always bad game mechanics.
I had the same observation. If we're in combat, and I have a non-combat-focused character and we're losing, I'm screwing over my party if I want to play the game, too, because I will be providing the GM with actions without my party getting the maximum survival benefit from them. That sucks.
This forced specialization can manifest in other aspects of the game, like stealth, social, exploration, etc.
Honestly I feel like it's up to the GM to just say that every player has to act at some point. Just like how the DM has freedom to basically let monsters act when he feels like it's appropriate, if a PC hasn't taken an action, and the others all have, I would toss the ball to that PC and tell him he has to act before any others can. Unlike D&D the GM is given a lot more power in a narrative system like DH. If it doesn't make sense in the fiction, don't allow it.
I suppose if the character actually wanted to be totally out of the conflict it'd be okay, but then he wouldn't be tanking hits either. And I don't think anyone is going to be such a liability you'd rather just not have them in the fight at all, even if their actions are suboptimal. If that is the case you may want to sit down with that player and help him move some stats around to be a more useful combatant.
DH is not supposed to be a tactical miniatures game like D&D. If you approach it like chess, it's not going to be as fun. Having one player just not act isn't fun and doesn't fit the fiction.
DH "Experiences" remind me of Aspects from Fate - a descriptive word or phrase that you can invoke in a variety of situations for a bonus but that the GM can also use against you. In fact, Daggerheart reminds me of Fate in general, but maybe trying to be a tiny bit crunchier?
I highly recommend that your Experience is conceived as a day job "Master Carpenter" or a specific previous experience "spotted a lost ship at sea at night during a storm from miles away". This in my experience hits a good sweet spot between too broad and too narrow.
They are definitely not something intended to be used against the player but rather to just bolster their character.
Daggerheart is FATE (Experiences, Hope, and bell curve) plus D&D (classes, levels, and general difficulty numbers), Blades in the Dark (the partial failure/partial success idea), and Guild Wars (multiple skills but you can only slot a few).
At least that's how I see it.
It also has aspects seen in other systems like Cortex (which has Plot Points and Doom Dice) as well as a strong narrative focus.
As the designers note in their section on inspirations for the game, Experiences are directly lifted from Backgrounds in 13th Age. There's only two differences: Experiences can affect combat rolls (in 13A it's only for non-combat skills), and they cost Hope to activate (in 13A Backgrounds are "always on").
I disagree with revealing enemy evasion and thresholds detracting from the narrative, simply because Dimension 20 is a very narrative heavy series, and Brennan Lee Mulligan always tells the players what the monster's AC, or the Skill Check's DC is before they roll, and that doesn't take away from the narrative of the series. (Sure it's 5e, not Daggerheart, but I think the point still stands)
to me, being open about DCs and monster stats falls right into what Alfred Hitchcock said about surprise vs suspense, show us the bomb!
@@lawrl777 Exactly!
Yah. @7:30 I'm going to need a d100 table of hope and fear examples.
This will be a cottage industry on DTRPG
LOL honestly, not a bad idea!
I think the easiest way to roll stats would be (1d4-2) x6. And their standard array reflects an exactly average roll of that. This is the beta and they likely didn't want data skewed by characters with all 2s. I'm guessing they'll have at least one other method in the final product.
I actually had a whole portion in the script for this and it was basically rolling a d2 which is essentially what you’ve got here. I ended up cutting it.
@@InsightCheck Rolling a D2 is not the same. There is no chance of getting a negative value in that.
@OsamaZahid308 lol yes I’m aware. As I said, it was just something I was thinking about and had started writing ultimately scrapped since it wasn’t what I wanted to get into.
Had a session zero yesterday to get a feel of the system and meet the players, and im really excited for the next session!
We had a short combat and one of the players noticed i was a bit quiet and lost (as a player and a character) and gave me a cue to strike. I rolled a crit and incinerated 2 enemies, and that created a nice replaying gimmick within the party, with the character that gave me the cue realy excited and worried, leading to whole talk about forests and fires and a few come backs after as we entered a tavern on a giant tree.
I think that with some time and familiarity the battles can flow really well.
I haven't played the game, but it really sounds like Daggerheart is much closer to Forged in the Dark or Powered by the Apocalypse systems than D&D, but then tries to shoehorn D&D-style combat into that mold, which is why a lot of the combat mechanics are so clunky and math-heavy to use very FitD resource management.
The hope and fear system also seems really cool but like it's designed for out-of-combat stuff and starts to struggle with D&D style combat since that involves so many dice rolls in a very short amount of in-game time and doesn't have strong notions of partial success or partial failure that aren't already built into the math.
I think a lot of people, myself included, do want a game that's somewhere in between the FitD/PbtA style and D&D/Pathfinder style, but I think it really wants a more creative resource management system so that you can draw on the same pool of resources for everything but basically run combat and non-combat as separate but related games.
When you are running the game it doesn't feel like a lot of math. Subtracting big damage numbers from big hp totals is completely absent and that helps a lot. Determining HP loss from damage taken is really just a glance, and there are some tricks that make it easier. The only regular mathy bit is adding the 2d12 for action rolls or rolling adding pools of dice for damage.
@@XerrolAvengerII I guess I hadn't thought about the fact that 2-digit subtraction is about as many steps as checking against a threshold and counting.
I personally like the chunk of making a dnd character, for for my play group my goodness is simpler a better fit. The questions, specifically relationships are fantastic. Also really love the experience bit. Very similar to core rules of Legends/City of Mist and Wildsea.
The fear thing, I bet taking a page out of Wildsea and inviting the other party members to supply ideas.
For fear i would not come up with a complication on the spot, the GM just gains Fear. Then when the fear is spent they describe the complication as its being used/activated on their terms not the terms of the dice.
Great video and I enjoyed hearing your point of view on the game. It was a blast playing with you and hope we can do it again! I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed DH
Thanks for the shout out!
I had a ton of fun playing and I’m looking forward to the next one!
Going through a full Session 0 and creating characters by going through the steps in the character packs together makes a huge difference in this game. Just finished a session 0 and ended up with some of the most interesting characters I have seen and a table of players deeply connected to them and the others, excited to get started.
if you like experiances then you should look at 13th age. They work the same as backgrounds in 13th age.
they're also basically Aspects from Fate, or tags from many other narrative games inspired by Fate
true FATE likely started this. Biggest difference is here they are your background and give different sized bonus@@lawrl777
Its strange to hear you say character creation was not so exciting or made you feel in touch with the character, the whole section of background questions and relationships with other folks is core to the creation and engages you with the real meaning of your version of the class as well as your hertiage and background. Its the best part.
The armor system means that when a PC takes damage, there's 5 steps to go though, 1 of which is a decision step. Comparitively, in 5e it's 3 steps and they're all just math. So yeah, it will take longer.
But on the other hand, compare how healing works, In 5e it's 2 steps with a lot of counting. In DH it's 1 step, no math.
There's also generally less math happening in other parts of DH combat, because there's not the potential to stack as many buffs and bonuses as in 5e.
Thanks for another great video. I also like the team actions (don’t know if you guys did it at the table), i feel DH encourages players to team up more and come up with interesting ways to describe how they can combine abilities.
I think we ended up doing it once. Definitely something I want to experiment with more in the future!
I tried building something similar to the Experience systems for the Backgrounds in my homebrew game system I'm building, but as I was building it, the more I hated how loose it was and it became nearly impossible to balance it due to the difference between narrow and broad skills, as well as deciding if the roll constitutes that skill or not. I ended up reverting back to a hard list Skills system because it's a lot easier on the DM to choose from a shortlist which proficiency to apply to any given roll. I've downloaded the playtest, so I'll take a look at it to see if it solves the issue I was having.
Some games combined the general and specific skills to a single check. For example, the Firefly RPG each character has a proficiency for every general skill and a specialty in one or two skills, which gets added only when the player is using their specialty. An experienced marksman who has Shoot D10 will add their specialty "Snipers D6" to their roll when using their sniper rifles. That exact same marksman, who is using a sidearm doesn't get to add the "Snipers D6" specialty to the total. This doesn't mean they are bad with other firearms, it just means they are more skilled with certain weapons.
The balancing is that all specialties start at D6 and never improve... while the player can improve the general skill.
*Shrugs*
Don't know if this helps or not, but it's just my thoughts on your problem.
@@aralornwolf3140 Thanks for the reply. I'll keep it in mind when I go back to the drawing board to go over the changes I need to make based off of my first playtest.
While I do Apreciate them making the system I struggle to see myself running this - it comes with a requirement of knowing the players because I can see alot of folks bouncing off hard due to the vagueness of the turn rules
It's definitely for a particular type of player and group. Knowing everyone really well will help a lot for sure.
It's not significantly different from PbtA or FitD style games and those both have a good number of fans. They are absolutely not for every group and it doesn't look like Daggerheart is aiming to be "something for everyone" either and that's a good thing.
One problem I've heard another content creator bring up is the death system. It does feel like it take the impact of death out when you can choose to take a scar rather than die. Of course, the dm gets to decide how debilitating it is.
But then if the injury is bad enough to disable the character, some of the prosthetics and magic items in the book are better than what you lost.
From what I see, I think having a list of pre-established suggestion wrinkles for rolling with fear would help massively. That way, if the GM can't think of something off of the top of their head, they can just pull something from the list (or otherwise, look to the list for inspiration while coming up with their wrinkles).
Appreicate this content! Im going to adapt the combat flow mechanism for my 5e table. Seems freeing.
As far as stat generation goes I think I read something where the total of all six has to equal 3. There could be room for some min maxing and taking more penalties in some stats to bump up others. But personally I like the standard array, as I always roll low stats.
The more I hear the less I want to play it.
I like rolling for abilities. It sounds like it's harder on the GM.
Thanks for the review
Happy to provide it! I wanted to do it so people can have more insight into it before deciding to sink time into it or not!
It's easier on the gm
I don't care for Daggerheart, but fuck rolling for stats. Good for them picking the array.
Haha to each their own :)! We love it and I’m glad they have a standard array, I just want to see more options!
100% this
People who are evangelical about not rolling for stats aren't that way because they don't like rolling their own stats. What they want is to control what OTHER people do and make sure other people do it the same way they do. And that's gross.
I haven’t had the chance to try out Daggerheart.
Looks interesting
Rolling with fear difficult? Nah, that would be the fun part. I've been using partial successes in my White Wolf games for years.
These things are not mutually exclusive. Improv'ing fear results will be hard on new GMs and those who are less spontaneous.
Everyone playtesting Daggerheart feels like watching people discover that other TTRPGs exist in real time.
lol I think everyone is well aware :P. It’s more about the names tied to it and many, including myself, are really interested to see what they come up with when it’s their own system from the ground up :)
Also, the reality is that there were a ton of players brought into 5e and TTRPGs more broadly as a direct result of Critical Role and this is likely their first look at an alternative system and that’s ok. Everyone expands their world somewhere. I’m not here to gatekeep anyone.
The character design process was great for my 9 and 11 year old kids.
I have 3 concerns with Domain cards. First, spell casters lose a lot of flexibility in spell selection. Second, characters with overlapping domains can’t select the same abilities. Third, only having 5 cards in hand at higher levels and having to spend stress to use the other abilities you earned through advancement doesn’t feel good.
To assuage your fear on flexibility, the wizard and bards domain cards are tomes and have multiple spells per card. You also can swap cards you have ready (in your loadout) with cards in your vault whenever you rest with no additional cost. Lastly you can pay stress in the moment of combat to swap out a card you have ready for a card in your vault, different cards have different stress costs to swap based on the power of the card.
I assume the cap on 5 domain cards comes from experience with D&D 4e, where the huge stack of powers at high levels led to a lot of analysis paralysis.
My biggest critique of the system that’s independent of types of players at the table is that GMing this system seems like quite the task.
I haven't played it, just watched the CR One-Shot of it, and yeah, just watching, the damage rolls seemed clunky and non-satisfying.
Out of the new systems coming out now, I'm most excited for is DC20. I think the mechanic of rolling damage and to-hit into a single roll is very simple and satisfying. The way in D&D and Daggerheart, that you can roll amazing to-hit, and then do almost nothing with your damage... is such a let-down...
This is a great review. I think it would be fun to play once or twice, but in general this is not my style of game. Especially players feeling like they are going to win every combat and feeling low variance on that - that sounds boring to me. People kill D&D for it's CR system, but it's HARD to try to make balanced encounters where the PCs are threatened but not immediately crushed.
This really is a game made for groups like CR, roleplay heavy, actor types, drama lovers, and people who are willing to take an active part in directing the narrative. It's not going to be for everyone. As to the point about skills, D&D didn't originally have skills, because the game was more abstract and skills were too crunchy. But 2e changed all that. And I'm still not sure the game needs them, at least not in so complex a form.
Can you comment on character death? From what I've seen it looks like character death will be extremely rare unless it's thematically justified (i.e. the player wants it to happen).
a player can entirely avoid the death of their PC as much as they want, death is always a choice or risk you opt into, but if you keep avoiding death you'll build up Scars and eventually have to retire
@@lawrl777 Thanks for confirming my suspicions.
Yeah their point is correct but slightly misleading in that you can’t necessarily avoid it “as much as you want”. They mentioned the Hope element( but it came off as a bit simpler than I think it is.
There’s 3 ways of dying as presented in the text, one includes going all out in a blaze of glory. One of the methods is to roll your Fear die and if it is equal to or less than your level you take a Scar. The intent is for you to work with the GM to describe how your situation gets “much worse” because of it. Sure, you could treat it as a get out of jail free card, but that’s clearly not the intent. Also, every Scar that you take reduces your maximum Hope by 1, when you cross out your last Hope slot, you die permanently. It’s also worth noting that there are no Death Saving Throws like in 5e. So, if you go down multiple times in the same fight and choose the “avoid death” option, you can take multiple scars just from one combat.
So
Experiences - essentially customer skill names - I love them and they are essentially 13th backgrounds - also similar the “pride” on forbidden lands
Duality dice - I thought I’d love these but mechanically they horrible - they suffer from all the success - with failure mechanics in narrative games ; and if a group is having significantly more hope that’s fear roles in a game with more 20 rolls in a night, sorry there is some serious cheating going on - it’s just simple math (critical role had something like 17 hope to 2 fear)
- the duality dice being paired is also an issue ; there have to be times when fear is more likely than hope and vice versa … my suggestion is weight the mechanics to d10/d10 with situational modifiers sting the dice up or down to d12-d8 - same curves, higher change of fear/hope
- damage … ffs this is just stupid … call it damage and wounds and move on
Stress I think is broken - it needs to be integrated into the “hit” mechanic
There is no initiative - there is no action economy- there is no stepping on toes ; you can’t say go whenever the narrative makes sense then complaint some people do it more that others - there needs to be a mechanic for taking “more” turns than others and the game has it … it’s called stress - when you give the DM a monster action token, you mark that as stress … then add a rule - when you succeed with hope, if you’ve already taking a turn in a scene, you can take a DM action to replace stress list in this way - I like it but it needs work
Re doing nothing - it’s 8%+46%, so 54% vs 46%… doesn’t really factor in.
Re crit - monsters will crit
Now the elephant … the writing is horrible , the organization atrocious and that needs attention more that wheelchair combat rules.
On rules - way too many for a rules lite game, by about 350 pages
This should be “boardgame” level of rules - cards should interact with the rules, but not change the rules (ie they are not exceptions to the rules) and fully contained in the cards (domain and class, background etc)
Monsters likewise should just be cards and tokens and “should always activate” as they are resource dependent - get rid of the d20, it’s completely unnecessary and homage to D&D that isn’t needed.
Seriously get really good editors and a new game designer
I don’t want this to go the way of OC which should have been an awesome game drawing on Vaesan, Blades and CoC - I mean it took real effort to mess that up
Not sure I agree with all of that. But respect the thoughtfulness and effort.
A common comment I hear is that hope and fear both accumulate too quickly for the players and the GM to spend it.
Also that the five outcome types is a lot to handle.
Would it be a good solution, to have 'normal' rolls (2d12 but no hope/fear, just a success or fail) besides duality rolls, and have duality rolls be a little bit more exceptional rather than having it be the norm? Or would that harm the nature of the game or add too many rules stuff?
Seems like modern OSR design theory combined with the ol White Wolf system.
it's a mash-up of PbtA and 5e (but with class feats/spells chosen every level kinda like PF2)
There's a surprising amount of playstyle cross over between OSR and Narrative games. Far more than either camp would care to admit, that's for sure.
My biggest issue in Daggerheart is that it basically gives every player the equivalent of ActionSurge/TwinnedSpell and Alert and a generic damage character can alphastrike every combat without actually being a jerk.
Not a low level problem but... higher level with proficieny damage bonuses WEW BUDDY!
Have you looked at high level creatures and their damage thresholds? Some creatures go up to 18/50/80 thresholds, so it's not like these proficiency levels just go against the same thresholds players have. You might roll 3d10 damage at proficiency 3 and only take 1HP from some of these enemies.
Even though the game is slightly skewed towards rolling with hope being more frequent, it's close enough to 50% that GMs can just break the flow of lucky players by spending fear. I don't see this alpha strike you speak about happening very often
Can you explain what you mean by this?
@@XerrolAvengerII I mean the game heavily skews for the damage focused PCs so go first and take all the actions as high level adversaries will have high thresholds that only the damage dealers can hit. Because weaker characters deal less damage AND give the GM action tokens. So the best tactic would be the damage dealer duking it out with the monsters almost every combat to minimize GM actions.
@@shocknix Since proficiency increases with level and there are weapons for each trait (so you get the best for your +2 trait), what is this "low damage" you speak of? Also, some classes have utility powers that don't deal damage, like healing or absorbing attacks from your friends.
If the damage dealer is low armored, they will also be the damage receiver and need healing. If they are heavily armored then they can't dodge shit and will eventually be without armor and need healing. I don't see this hypothetical scenario you speak of where the damage dealer rolls with hope several times in a row and is always in reach of an enemy (remember, moving more than short range to attack requires an agility roll that might roll with fear)
@@dancovich Analytically, @shocknix is correct. Sure, every now and then you might need a utility thing, but the best strategy in combat will almost always be to let the combat-focused characters take all of the turns, and not give up a Monster Action Token to have the Bard do some marginal thing. The reality is that PC actions now compete with EACH OTHER for action economy efficiency, and each player is now asked to share their actions and use them for the good of the party. Which is going to mean some PCs/players sitting out some combats/rounds/situations completely. Probably frequently.
you have have a 60% chance for hope, but success is easily modified by the GM for the target evasion or DC.
18:15 I would make the enemy lose an aditional stress or losing an armor.
Where do you get the art that you use from? I'd love to find that picture with the black spikes coming out of the ground.
It’s almost all from 5e books! If you timestamp it I can probably figure out which one.
I think it's going to be a good game. However, I've seen narrative-forward games like this before. I doubt it'll take over D&D's space as the representative of TTRPGs. Honestly, I doubt that it would make much of a blip on most people's radars if Critical Role wasn't involved with it.
i have said i think daggerheart is for roleplyers and D&D is for turn base dice rollers. the problem i see is the people that have no imagination or cant think on their feet daggerheart is not for you. if you have fun when you get to a town/city this is for you.
I reckon you should playtest it in bad faith, so to speak. The idea is to see what happens in edge cases.
Great video, now do DC20!
You could still easily roll for stats, using the D&D scale
rolling with fear is only more complicated when you're used to the simplest, least interesting "you either do it or nothing happens" resolution DnD implies, you should only be rolling dice if there's risk, so when you're thinking about what might happen succeed or fail on every roll then adding success-at-a-cost is easy, you just give the player both or parts of both
Couldn’t players spend excess hope by simply helping their allies all the time?
I have a feeling there going to be talk about this game but nobody will be really playing it. What I do hear is people switching to shadowdark.
Something that annoys me is experiences are just so meaningless most of the time, at level 1 you have a +2 to a roll (if you spend a resource) at best from background. Now i dont think 5e's skills are perfect, but any average PC at level 1 will have at least one +5 in their best ability and more slightly less than that. That makes more defined charachters as the mechanics fit.
Now theres a debate about how most dms run skill checks and wizards breaking down doors barbarians couldnt, but thats a fairly system agnostic discussion imo. Its just i do all this work to make my unique backstory which grants me bonsues in places only i could get them (which i love) for a grant totaly of making my 11, a 13. WOW i feel so unique and heroic.
The probability of a critical succes is not 8% as you mention. That’s just the probability of any number in a d12 to land, the actual probability of a critical succes is 0.08*0.08=0.006 or 0.6%. So it is definitely not higher than D&D’s 5%.
This is not how probability works. To have two matching dice, one of them is “correct” 100% of the time. As a result you only need to calculate the odds of a match.
Or simpler. There are 144 different possible rolls on 2d12. 12 of them are crits (1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3) etc. 12/144 is 8.3%.
@@InsightCheck That's not how probability works. Look into probability of independent events. You are calculating it as if it was a 144 face die with 12 "correct" landings, but each event (or die in this case) is different so you have to multiply the probability of each die to land on one number. If you threw them separately and you were trying to match the "correct" number of the first one you threw it would be 8,3%, but as you throw them at the same time it's only 0,6%.
@ScrappyCocoCR I can assure you that this is 100% how probability works in this scenario. There are 144 possible outcomes on 2d12. 12 of those are crits. 12/144 is 8.33333333%
There are 20 possible outcomes on 1d20. One if those is a crit. 1/20 is 5%.
@@InsightCheck Coins landing on the same face and dice landing on the same number are the basic examples they use for teaching probability of independent events in school. If you google "how to calculate two dice landing the same number" it says what I've been trying to explain to you. It says "The probability of one dice being a particular number is 1/6. The probability of two dice being the same particular number is 1/6 x 1/6 = 1/36. This is not the same as saying that both dice are the same number. There are six different possible numbers, so that would be 6/36 or 1/6."
Really enjoyed the video, not trying to be an ass, but that's just incorrect.
@ScrappyCocoCR I’m glad you enjoyed the video and I really don’t think you’re being an ass lol. I do see exactly where you are coming from and how you’re arriving at your odds but it’s isn’t accurate for what we are trying to do to calculate the crit chance.
You are calculating the odds of getting any specific pair. The odds of getting exactly a 1 and a 1 or exactly a 6 and a 6. In that case, you are completely correct that the odds of getting any specific pair is 1/144. However, that isn’t what matters in the game since you don’t care *which* numbers you double, just that you roll doubles. In which case the odds are 12/144 or 1/12.
You can also see this if you multiply your 0.69% by 12 you will arrive at the same 8.3% chance.
Is it true you can crit succeed on any dual role regardless of whether you make the DC or not, even a one one on the two d12s...... If that is so.... that is ridiculous.
And there's no critical fail????
That definitely needs to change..... Say like it's a critical success if they get the dual numbers and meet the DC and get a hope..... or critical fail if they dual numbers but don't get the DC and the DM gets a fear!!
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I also don't like the weapon damage, I mean a dagger and a long sword both do d8 damage i believe....WWT??
It should be small weapons do D4 damage, medium weapon's do d8 damage and large weapons do d12 damage.
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Daggerheart is easy to be OP for players as it is now.
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I think the only time you should get hope or fear from a dice roll is in combat and only on a critical role outside of combat!
.... That's my two cents....
Please take this comment as a constructive one, not a critcal one. Meaning this comment is coming from someone who wants to help out, not criticise. Your content is great. Your analysis valuable. But in your script or presentation, you need to reduce the number of times you say the word "really". Down load the transcript and you'll see just how often it is used. As an adjective it adds little. There is not much difference between something being enjoyable or really enjoyable. And when you use the word as often as you do it starts to grate on the listener.
Honestly, thanks for pointing it out, I don’t think I’ve ever even noticed this. I went and checked my script and I used the word 24 times in this video. That’s averaging more than once per minute hahaha. I’ll be more aware of that in the future. Thanks :)
@InsightCheck you're welcome. Thanks for taking the comment as a positive one. And thanks for the channel and content. Am a fan
@texmame I appreciate it :)
@texmame hahaha this is so funny. I just went to review my script for my next video, it was there 21 times. I think I got rid of 19 of them. I never noticed.
@@InsightCheck so, you “really” appreciate it? 😜
How many women were in your playtest? I am super concerned that the "whenever" initiative system will end up prioritizing groups that commonly have an easier time speaking out and taking control, and will end up making a worse game experience for people who either don't have the same level of social forwardness (or comfort) or who can be in danger of being overlooked in male-centric groups. Any thoughts?
I don't think Daggerheart is for me. The problem with the duality dice is that they turn the very concept of TTRPGs on its head. DMs create a world and a set of problems. The players make decisions to solve those problems, and they make rolls to determine how well their player interacts with the world. With duality dice, players make rolls that not only determine their effectiveness but also rewrite the world around them to an extent. Everything the DM does becomes reactionary. I don't hate anyone for liking daggerheart, but I struggle to see a world where this is ever a quality game system.
It’s certainly not for everyone and the entire world is extremely reactionary which will definitely not sit well with many. Someone else commented that it’s just a bad D&D clone and I was blown away lol, it plays so differently and the entire concept is fundamentally different. But they do both have dice lol!
It’s definitely not a game for everyone though that’s for sure!
I'm not sure what you mean by it being reactionary. Fear is a resource that provides structure for what a GM wants to do. It combined with action tokens give the gm a kind of fuel tank that helps create a balance between the GM and the party. Although players and GMs will always be on opposite sides of the teeter totter, the statistics is still well balanced and a GM that is not over or under spending fear will not present an encounter too trivial or too overwhelming for the players. As a dm who tends to be a bit control freaky about encounters and rules, it is a little daunting but learning to trust fear and action tokens amd embrace the freedom of turn order can really make the game way less stressful.
Also play with a wild magic sorcerer who finds a deck of many things at level 1 and we'll have a conversation about reactionary dming lmao
@@XerrolAvengerII Completely pointless extreme outlier example. Thanks for nothing.
@@XerrolAvengerII that makes no sense and in no way should that weird outlier ever happen.
yeah i am not a fan of the loose mechanics like no initiative. it feels like it can get to messy and unbalanced.
after 1 minute of listening about combat this game is not for me
Now try playing with six randos from your LGS or the internet.
Yeah I have mentioned that I don’t think it’s a game that’ll work great for everyone. It requires certain expectations to be set between all players.
For what it’s worth though I did only know one of the people on the game.
@@InsightCheck Yes, but you did know that the others were experienced players who were not "problem players".
@fred_derf yeah, that’s why I said, an emphasized in the previous video, that knowing your players well will be the real determining factor in whether or not a group is successful with it.
Ha. Winner.
Damn it. Silver medal gang!
"I love tedious character creation...armor is too tedious."
Great video. You present everything like someone I want to talk to, it doesn't seem like someone just talking shit. See dicebreaker.
@daxmcanear haha I think they are experienced a bit differently. Character creation happens independently of the game on my own time, I like that :). Armor happens during the moment and takes me out of it! Dunno if that makes sense!
Why would you name the good one hope? Hope is evil, hope only serves to raise us up higher so that our fall shall be more devastating
Asymmetrical combat (or anything else for that matter) and I'm out. I'm not playing a game where I'm forced to bring a knife to a gun fight.
i really really hope they go full PbtA and have players roll 2d12 to defend
Meta currencies AND cards? hard pass.
i don't really like the emphasis on toys at the table (that includes the unnecessary rules for maps and minis), but to be clear, Hope has a cap of 5 per PC and the cards are just for reference, you never shuffle, draw, or play them
Played at GenCon, short answer, Daggerheart sucks. If your a Critical Roll Fan boy, then go at it. So many other better games. Hope/Fear is a horrible design.
What was your issue with it? It has worked out fine for me so far.
Going by the statement, some kind of issue with the Hope/Fear system. That or Critical Role as a whole.
To each their own. Saying it “sucks” is a pretty broad statement. I had plenty of fun and I’m sure many others will too :)
@@007ohboy Feel good getting that off your chest buddy? We're used to grumblers in the game, so pop off King.
@007ohboy lol
If you have experience with PbtA you won't have any difficulties playing this game. If you're strictly a 5e person, it's more of a struggle.